A Gift from Sylvia

When I was doing the creative writing part of my English literature coursework I wrote a ridiculous amount of sort of experiment pieces if you will. This one I wrote after reading Sylvia Plath's 'The Bee Meeting'.

A Gift from Sylvia

A nightmare again. These people surround me and welcome me into their arms with plastered clown smiles fixed always on their mouths. Their white faces the same as the next. Why are they all in these white masks, like grotesque phantoms? Their eyes tell a different story. Eyes that peer out at me, piercing eyes that search me to find some way to change me and cover up my ugly human skin with perfect white paint. They want me to look like them. I make them as uncomfortable as they make me. Their eyes are as dead as their smiles, but the eyes cannot disguise what looks like pain and dissatisfaction.

Why must I live in this perfect white skin? It suffocates me like a death shroud, clinging to me and lowering me down into a shallow grave. We will dare not be anything but one shape and one colour. Got freckles scars or birthmarks? It is no worry; we’ll scrub them out for you. We will scratch at you and crush you until you are a perfect glimmering diamond. If you have any flaws we’ll discard you and try out the next lump of coal we come across, on our on-going assembly line of perfect beauty.